The essay
by milkwood
Summary: The pressures of sixth year demand some sort of emotional downfall. Don't they?


Procrastination

A steady flow of words peeled off the parchment as my eyes soaked them one by one. The loops and contours of the script both mesmerised and disgusted me together as they printed my mind. Writing, as an aesthetic thing could be of breathtaking beauty, I pondered while reading. However, it never seemed to be quite perfect, in which was infuriating.

I hated it.

And loved it.

The ink, like liquid liquorice stared out from its well, trapped, hugging the glass. And my quill stabbed the tranquil of its body. Murder. Writing. I was murdering the page too.

Especially with this crap! Transfiguration had become a burden to my creative flare. Oh, to be a writer. A real writer. Not just a journalist or essayist.

God. This really is awful. Scanning the print I swallowed the bitter taste of conformity.

_As reflected in the first experiment, Gamp's Third Law inhibits the caster to conjure an object that is required for the need of sustenance for a living thing .To thusly use such methods the caster is restricted to-_

"Urgh," Ridges of distaste moulded my nose, my mouth hell bound. With a swipe of my wand the papers collected in order of subject. Even that annoyed me- why was it so immaculate? The writing, the pages, the books, the piles. Was I really that tight-assed? My book bag answered for me, its gaze painted by size arranged quills and colour coded study notes.

Deflation wasn't the best feeling to mix with self-pity. And both mixed horribly with the omnipresent cloud cover of Scotland and suffocation of night.

Was I a word churner, a pawn of the Professors, of the Ministry? An envelope licker. An arse kisser. Oh, Hermione…

The words had no aesthetic purpose when the content was rubbish. Why would you be a damn teacher, I swore.

The passage scanned my mind once more. With a jerk of my wrist, ink splattered the page, a laceration of black blood pooling, floating on the parchment. I sighed; a ragged creature clawed its way out of my nostrils into the common room atmosphere.

My 11:35pm thoughts were interrupted with a moan from the corner of the common room.

With a twitch of my neck I was blessed with the sight of a passionate make-out session between the Boy-Who-Lived and the Ginger-Who-Loved. I cringing at the sight. A stroll, I thought, would be best to supplement my mood.

Turns out the air is a little too fresh in late January.

And it also turns out that my cloak was left on the back the seat in the common room.

Funnily enough, I lost sensation of my fingers shortly after leaving the suffocation of the portrait hole. Shoving my palms under my opposite arm, I jogged down the stairs savouring the _tack, tack, tack _of my oxfords against the sandstone.

However, the onomatopoeia of my footsteps did nothing to diminish my brooding.

I knew I pissed off with myself. But I didn't know why. So it was fitting at that moment to find the closest thing to blame.

It wasn't the large mound of school work that was the frustrating thing. I worked best under pressure, even if that pressure spans the length of the school year. I kept up alright, I guess. But there were better- I was acutely aware of the competing schools in Europe. Hogwarts, as I tried to instil into my peers, wasn't the be all and end all of the world. We weren't the only young wizards competing for the NEWTS or OWLS, and definitely not the best.

My year had around 50 students in it. We were also depression babies, that is, we were born during the war. And if my math were correct -which it was- that would mean that our year, by fact of sheer numbers was considerably less-able than, say, the 100 students that made up first year. Therefore, my slight obsession with high standards was totally justifiable in the circumstances I was overcome with.

My freight train of thought swung a harsh corner in the tracks of my emotions. _Tack, tack, tack, tack. _Second floor.

It wasn't me. It was them.

They didn't see it.

Was ambition just another word to them? A world misspelled in their vocabulary of mediocrity?

It was Lavender and Pavati who spent hours gazing through _EllaWitch _Magazine, chirping about perfect hair and perfect sex. It was Dean and Seamus, who spent their lessons up-back, engraving their initials into the benches of the classrooms. It was Harry, with the world perched on his left shoulder, tossing away vital survival study in place of sucking Ginny's face. I cringed. The taste in mouth- like day old coffee- forced me to swallow.

Ginny: her absolute assurance in her ability to win over the world. That charming smile. That gleaming hair that swished at the precise moment caught between innocent flirt and ostensive sex appeal. The female ginger had the priceless knack of drawing attention to herself for all the right reasons.

Immanent in my mind was a lump of jealousy, crawling like mould. I promptly disregarded it and acknowledged my self-loathing pride for my own knack of drawing attention to myself for all the wrong reasons.

Hermione Know It All Granger. Hermione Carrot Up Her Arse Granger. Hermione 40 Year Old Virgin Granger.

I halted in my haste. Unknowingly I had journeyed to the end of the second floor hall, with only a narrow stairwell between me and the vista of Hogwarts.

The scene through the vast archway was breathtaking, a view that swelled in the confined of its stone frame. Midnight reflected an ominous sort of beauty upon the Lake that gazed open mouthed at the moon and the moon that pinched the tar-licked sky.

I exhaled, planting a hand on my hip. Stupid Hallway. Stupid Hermione. Stupid Victor. Stupid Boys and Stupid Girls.

A cocktail of guilt and giddiness intoxicated my vision.

The stone beneath my feet glared through its cobbled face.

Ginny and I had spoken about this place. About what happened at this place. About an international Quidditch star, a Yule Ball, a kiss and Hogwarts know-it-all.

One statement, one moment:

"_Victor and I kissed."_

It was like a badge of honour. You were in or you were out. And I'd just dived head first with a half pike _in_.

I can't even recollect how it came to subject. Whatever prior conversation we'd had became irrelevant at that moment through. Ginny's face squinted, her crescent lips like a sarcasm detector. She was sussing for a loophole. Surely Hermione hasn't spent the last four years building up that asexual veneer to have it shattered by the exclamations of romance?

It had been in that moment that my faith had dripped like melted wax off a lit candle. A river of wax, winded down the neck of the taper with the widening of the Weasley daughter's eyes. It was a test, she though, was I joking? _I had to be joking. _

But I wasn't joking. I was lying. And part of Ginny must've known that too.

In the words of my mother: _"If you say something enough, you'll eventually believe it", _I felt that Ginny began to convince herself of my lack of innocence with the male species. And when she spat the photocopied allusion of my fling with Krum into her brother's face this year, I almost believed it too.

And this was the place it happened, or would've happened… Had I actually kissed the damn Bulgarian. Stupid hormones, I cursed internally. Hermione Granger was above the regular dispensability of the teenage image. Wasn't she?

Looking down, all I was the scuffed toe of my school shoes. Not a fine Cinderella slipper, but my ugly shoe and peeling stocking. The tingle of my Yule Ball dress no longer licked my skin, in its place a heavy uniform that couldn't even keep me warm.

My chilled hands cupped my nose and mouth as I exhaled the warmth of my breath onto the skin. This was reality. No moonlight kisses or handheld waltzes in this dimension for Hermione. Once again my mind flicked back to Harry and Ginny intertwined in the common room, the hearth casting towers of shadow and light on their embrace.

It wasn't me. It was them.

All of them.

Every last one of the students at Hogwarts that sought after number of dates rather than number of A's. A kiss would last a minute, but a good reputation was immortal.

The indignant huff that left my mouth curled in the still air. The misted breath billowed in a spiral out of my lungs and floated on the layers of icy atmosphere before disintegrating with the cold. I tried it again, except this time, exhaling without a muffled sound.

The cloud I created was nowhere near as theatrical as the last. It simply disappeared. I was suddenly captured by a primary school memory that floated down with the mist from my breath…

Leaving the library at lunch for the first time ever, I had ventured onto the sports oval for no apparent reason.

Each footstep outdoors murder the postcard frosted grass with a satisfying, murderous I _crunch. _

Netted around me was a game of soccer, or more like a bunch of school children set upon a ball like seagulls to a chip. They moved as one clump. A clump of steaming bodies. A dim sim? On the rim of the oval sat groups, peeling the bark of the trees or gathering litter into piles and chanting while circling around the garbage.

So this is what life outside of the library was like.

In the back corner of the field a group of girls in the year above me had sticks pinched between their index and middle fingers. I gazed at them as they raised the sticks to their mouth, one knee bend, one hip raised, and sucked on the end of the twig with pursed lips. In the winter chill, they exhaled, their 'O' shaped mouth releasing a plume of frosted air. As the group flicked the imaginary ash from their playground cigarettes, one of the girl's eyes snatched mine from the middle of the oval.

She turned and smirked with her friends before, they took a drag from their twigs and puffed in my direction in unison. Their eyes had glowed with the embers of child malice as I turned and staggered between the dim sim of children back to the quadrangle where my collection of faithful novels awaited me.

I hadn't been on a sporting oval since then. And the image of those 11 year olds smoking tree sticks still smouldered my memory of junior school.

The kernel of my frustration was advancing. Was I the smoke or the cigarette?

Was I wasting away on the good grades and Transfiguration essays that rotted my heart and soul? Was I glowing so bright, so bitter hot that I was bound to turn to ash and scatter to the wind in a million flakes? Was simply a creature breathed rom the bellows of life-expectations of careers and goals and dead in the arse aspirations?

I'd already proved my transparency in living a through a blanketed lie. These lips, as much as they wanted to, had never brushed against the silk of another human being. Ever. This mind would never achieve the great things that were solid expectations as a result of "Outstanding"s and 100%s.

My legs set off again, except this rendition of footsteps sounded more like sedated, velveteen Gymnopédie. The pompousness in me had swollen and burst.

My feet trailed to a wall lamp and for the first time in my existence I actually _watched _the flame. It's dance, devastatingly destructive and glorious scorched my mind. The glow ricocheted from the wick in agitation. Wobbling lamplight jiggled the walls in hyperbolic waves, casting my face gold and black. Light and shadow.

Did I stay there for minutes? Hours? Time meant nothing to the flame. Only the length of the wick mattered.

I was back in the common room- guided through the portrait hole by the volcanic goose bumps that polka dotted my naked arms. The firelight once again proved me two paced. The cloak I donned no longer hugged me. It simply hung.

And the essay:

The chair creaked as I sat. My face was a blank canvas, an artwork caked over with lumpy gesso. It was lumpy blank. The worst type of blank to be.

Transfiguration was shitty. And so was I.

So we made the perfect couple at midnight, I guess.


End file.
